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Reason #3 Americans Don’t Ride Transit
It’s Expensive

By | | Transportation
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The transit industry claims that transit saves people money. But the truth is that, for most people, it costs a lot less to drive than to ride transit.

Public transit is the most heavily subsidized form of transportation in the United States, with subsidies per passenger mile that are 50 to 100 times greater than subsidies to driving. But people who use transit are only dimly aware of the subsidies. Even without counting the subsidies, most people don’t ride transit partly because the alternatives, including driving, cost so much less.

The 2015 National Transit Database shows that people pay an average of 28 cents per passenger mile to ride transit. To compare this cost with driving, the American Public Transportation Association uses American Automobile Association calculations of the cost of driving, which show an average cost of about 57 cents a mile for medium-sized cars. So it seems like a no-brainer to conclude that transit saves money.

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Reason #2 Why Most Americans Don’t Ride Transit
It Doesn’t Go Where You Want to Go

By | | Transportation
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Most transit is oriented to downtown, a destination few people go to anymore. If you don’t want to go downtown, transit is practically useless.

This week, the Antiplanner is exploring the myth that Americans don’t ride transit because they have some kind of irrational love affair with their cars. In fact, there are very good reasons why autos provide well over 95 percent of mechanized travel in urban areas, and transit’s limited destinations is one of them.

The Portland urban area, for example, has around 15,000 miles of roads and streets. The region’s 80 miles of rail transit don’t begin to reach the number of destinations that can be reached by car. Adding the roughly 1,000 miles of bus routes helps, but still requires many people to walk long distances to and from transit stops.

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Reason #1 Why Americans Don’t Ride Transit:
Transit Is Slow

By | | Transportation
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Most transit is much slower than driving, and a lot of transit is slower than cycling.

There’s a myth that Americans have some kind of irrational love affair with their cars, and they don’t ride transit because of that irrationality. In fact, there are very good reasons why autos provide well over 95 percent of mechanized travel in urban areas while transit provides less than two percent.

One of the most important reasons is that transit is slow. According to the American Public Transportation Association’s Public Transportation Fact Book, the average speed of rail transit is 21.5 miles per hour, while the average speed of bus transit is 14.1 mph (see page 7). So-called rapid transit, known to the Federal Transit Administration as heavy rail, averages just 21.1 mph, while light rail is 15.6 mph and streetcars are a pathetic 7.7 mph (see page 40).

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Is There a Monorail in Your Future?

By | | Transportation
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Asian-based writer Adam Minter has taken a hard look at China’s high-speed rail program and found it wanting. The country has built some 12,000 miles of high-speed rail lines, more than the rest of the world combined.

Despite China’s population density and low rate of auto ownership, only one line makes money. The state-owned China Railways Corporation is $600 billion in debt, and that debt is increasing by more than $60 billion per year. It has gotten to the point where the country is building rail mainly to stimulate the economy, not to improve transportation.

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Resisting Rail

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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San Antonio, notes Texas Public Radio, is “the largest city in the country without a rail system to move” its residents. As a result, the article implies, people are “stuck behind the wheel,” and the article’s headline asks, “Should San Antonio Reconsider Rail?”

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, of course, suggests that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” But more important, the article is guilty of the Politician’s Fallacy, which is: “1. We have to do something [in this case, about congestion]. 2. This [rail] is something. 3. We have to do this [build rail].”

Before jumping to any conclusions, San Antonians should ask how well rail is moving people in other cities. The first point to note is that, when TPR says that San Antonio is the largest city not to have rail, there are only six larger cities to consider. We don’t think of San Antonio is being the nation’s seventh-largest city, but it is true because Texas cities have strong annexations powers, so tend to be much larger than cities elsewhere. Houston, Dallas, and Austin are also among the nation’s eleven largest cities.

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Is the Oil Industry Subsidized?

By | | Transportation
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Civil engineer and transportation expert David Levinson starts with the premise that the oil industry receives $20 billion in subsidies from the United States each year, and concludes that this subsidy has minimal impact on urban transit. When, a few years ago, gasoline prices were double what they are today, transit ridership was only about 0.1 percent greater than it is today. Assuming ridership would have kept up with population growth, a “100% increase the price of fuel gets you a 5% increase in ridership,” says Levinson.

But back up a minute. Who says the oil industry gets $20 billion in annual subsidies? As the anti-petroleum group, Oil Change International admits, most of that “subsidy” is a tax deduction for oil exploration. As Forbes points out, this is the kind of subsidy that is “also available to any U.S. manufacturer such as Apple or Microsoft.” As the pro-petroleum OilPrice.com says, “The suggestion that depletion or depreciation deductions on income from investments that might not otherwise exist amount to a subsidy is a remarkable interpretation of the rules of accounting and the English language.”

Some countries, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, actually give their residents direct subsidies to use oil. The United States does so only to help low-income people buy fuel oil to heat their homes. Otherwise, the “subsidies” people complain about are really just tax deductions for ordinary business expenses.

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Atlanta’s Streetcar Named Disaster

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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The Antiplanner’s friend, Benita Dodd, reviews the Atlanta streetcar on the second anniversary of its inaugural run. It was supposed to cost $72 million to build. It cost $97 million. It was supposed to cost $1.7 million a year to operate. It actually costs $5.3 million.

It was projected to earn $420,000 a year in fares. During its first year, it earned nothing because it was free. In the second year, the city began charging $1 a ride, and it earned under $200,000. When it was free, it carried 2,600 riders a day. After they began charging, ridership fell to less than 1,500 a day, less than half the projected number.

It normally runs on Saturday nights until 1 am. Last Saturday, “to accommodate large crowds” for New Years Eve, the city stopped running it at 4:30 pm. (Despite the absurdity of the claim that not running the streetcar will accommodate large crowds, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reprinted the city’s press release word for word.) Naturally, after all these great successes, the city wants to build 22 more miles of streetcar lines.
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The $4.5 Billion New Year’s Party

By | | Transportation, Urban areas
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New York City celebrated the new year by opening the insanely expensive Second Avenue Subway. Just two miles and three stations long, this subway line cost nearly $4.5 billion, or more than $35,000 per inch, making it the most expensive subway in the world.

Of course, not all of that money went for digging tunnels and laying track, which cost “only” $734 million (which is still more than $5,000 per inch). The three stations cost $800 million each. But that’s not all: to complete the Second Avenue subway, the city also spend $500 million on engineering and $800 million for “management, real estate, station artwork, fare-collection systems and other sundry items.” If the entire New York City subway system cost that much, it would have cost more than $500 billion, or roughly the cost of the entire 47,856-mile Interstate Highway System in today’s dollars.

Of course, the city didn’t pay for it alone. The federal government chipped in at least $1.3 billion. The state of New York put in some money, but much of the money probably came from bridge tolls paid by auto drivers. Actual riders of the Second Avenue subway will pay very little of the cost and what they do pay will be paid indirectly.

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2015 Transit Data

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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As I promised yesterday, I’ve compiled what I consider to be the most important data in the 2015 National Transit Database into one spreadsheet. These data include trips, passenger miles, vehicle revenue miles & hours, weekday trips, fares, operating costs, maintenance costs, capital costs, BTUs of energy consumption, and grams of carbon dioxide emissions.

The 2015 database is expanded from previous years, which just included data from transit systems in major urban areas over 50,000 people. The 2015 data also include transit systems in minor urban areas of under 50,000 people, rural areas, and Indian reservations. The major urban area data fill the first 2,066 lines of the spreadsheet, while the rest fill the next 1,549 lines. The major urban areas accounted for 10.377 billion transit trips in 2015, while the smaller areas accounted for a mere 128 million trips.

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New Transit Data

By | | Transportation, Useful Data
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The Federal Transit Administration has posted 2015 transit data as part of the National Transit Database. However, the Department of Transportation’s new web sites have made downloading data fairly tedious.

To save you time, I’ve downloaded the data and then uploaded them in two zip files. First is the Historic Time Series showing data from 1991 through 2015. Second is a more detailed 2015 database, providing safety, energy, and other detailed data not found in the historic time series. Each of these files is between 10 and 11 megabytes in size.

For simple things such as capital costs, operating costs, fares, trips, and passenger miles, the historic time series is an excellent source of information. The most useful files are table 2.1, “operating expenses and services,” which has separate sheets for operating costs, fares, vehicle revenue miles and hours, trips, and passenger miles, and table 3.1, “uses of capital costs,” which has capital expenses. All of the sheets in these two tables break down data by transit agency and mode. Unfortunately, the capital expense sheet does not break down the difference between new projects and maintenance of existing projects.

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